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by nusmella 1044 days ago
We have a 10TB database we switched from Aurora to Postgres and it cut out bill by 80%. However, there are some differences in our schema such as now using native partitions so it's hard to tell how much $ is due to the switch and how much due to our table and query design.

We have a similar story with DynamoDB too.

4 comments

Curious what you mean by switching from Aurora to Postgres? AWS offers Postgres on Aurora, and Postgres on regular RDS. Do you mean you switched to RDS, or off of AWS altogether, or something else?
I mean that we switched from RDS Aurora Postgres to RDS regular Postgres
Probably means Aurora MySQL. In CloudFormation and other AWS artifacts, "Aurora" is a keyword that regularly comes up meaning MySQL, since that was the original target for Aurora years before the Postgres flavor was released. There are AWS old-timers at my shop that call it Aurora, and it shows up in their YAML.
To whomever downvoted, when specifying the AWS::RDS::DBCluster "Engine" property in CloudFormation, aurora = mysql5.6 and below, aurora-mysql = mysql5.7 or mysql8.x, aurora-postgresql = postgres. Since 5.6 was deprecated, the "aurora" engine type was removed the CF docs, but it was there until a few years ago. "Aurora" was synonymous with MySQL for a while.

#AWSHistory

People downvoted because you were assuming that when someone says "we moved to postgres" they would mean "we moved to mysql" as if they wouldn't know what they were talking about.

Even your history thing makes no sense, Aurora Postgres was launched 9 months after Mysql version in July 2015.

Aurora MySQL was released October 2014.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/highly-scalable-mysql-compa...

Aurora Postgres hit general availability October 2017. (Sorry, betas and early release offerings don't count.)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-amazon-aurora...

Quick math… carry the two… compute the partial differential equation…

Looks like 3 YEARS between the release of Aurora MySQL and Aurora Postgres.

Yes, if you choose other definitions for launch dates you can come up with many different timespans.
> People downvoted because you were assuming that when someone says "we moved to postgres" they would mean "we moved to mysql" as if they wouldn't know what they were talking about.

What? That's not what that comment says at all. They're saying that aurora mysql was a plausible interpretation of what OP moved from, before OP clarified.

Yep, I was wrong about the source DB in retrospect, but that other guy just seems to want to argue with straw men. Takes all kinds, I guess.
> using native partitions

FWIW, I'm actively exploring native partitions on Aurora with Postgres and I'm seeing very little benefit. Two identical tables, each with 500M+ rows, and I'm not seeing any meaningful performance/IO changes. A composite index with the partition key as the first entry has been as effective for reducing IO and query time as partition pruning. I'm sure there are workloads where partitioning makes more sense, but I've been surprised by how little difference there was in this case.

> it's hard to tell how much $ is due to the switch and how much due to our table and query design.

Sounds like good material for a technical blog post.

What's the story with DynamoDB?